Key Verse: Verse 1 – "I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity."
Key Words: enjoy pleasure
Think about all that Solomon had. He had filled his life with beautiful properties, delicious food, lavish resorts, personal servants, sexual gratification, costly possessions, productive farms, lucrative mines, global treasures, and endless entertainment. But when he stepped back to consider, he saw the emptiness of it all, and he actually hated his life: “Therefore I hated life…for all is vanity and vexation of spirit” (Ecclesiastes 2:17).
J. Vernon McGee tells how he and Mrs. McGee were attending a Bible conference.
“In the evenings after a service we need to get away from everyone for a while, and one of the things we like to do is just go walking through a shopping area. I have said to her, 'Would you like to be able to buy everything that you see and want?’ She answered that she wondered how it would feel to be able to do that. Well, Solomon did just that. Anything his little heart desired, he bought. As he looked out upon this world, there was nothing that it withheld from him.
“You would think that all men in that position would be happy. Well, I don’t know why, but they are not. I am told that we have more suicides here in Southern California than the average for the country. One would think it would be the bums on skid row, the down-and-outers, who would be the ones to commit suicide. Life certainly wouldn’t seem to be worth much to them. Actually, those are not the ones with the high suicide rate. It is the rich, the famous, the Hollywood movie and television stars, the folk who seem to have made it. They are the ones who commit suicide. Why? They have come to the same conclusion that Solomon did. He had tried everything in the way of pleasure and concluded: ‘Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 2:11).”
What to do:
✞ Remember that pleasure is but for a season, then it becomes displeasure (Hebrews 11:25).
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